The invention is directed to an approach for implementing scoring and performance ranking systems/methods.
Performance appraisals are generally used to measure and quantify the job performance of employees within an organization. There are many reasons for performing such appraisals of employees. For example, such appraisals are often used to document criteria for allocating organizational rewards, to form the basis for salary, bonus, stock grants and any other type of compensation allocation decisions, and to provide reasons for promotions or disciplinary actions.
There are many approaches that can be taken to undertake performance appraisals. A common approach to assessing employee performance is to use rating system whereby managers are asked to score an individual against a number of objectives and attributes. In some companies, employees receive only receive these rating assessments from their managers. In other organizations, such assessments may also be received from other individuals and entities, such as ratings from peers, subordinates, and customers.
One problem with conventional rating systems is that they are often at a very high level of granularity. For example, many organizations provide nothing more than a set of generic ratings for employees for individual categories encapsulated by terms such as “meets expectations,” “exceeds expectations,” or “needs improvements.” While these are generic categories that are easy to understand and apply to employee ratings, they are at too high of levels to adequately provide specific ratings to employees. Organizations often want a more granular rating/ranking system than are provided by conventional approaches. For example, an organization might have 60% of the employee ratings in the middle positions, but still need to understand how people are ranked within that group. Even if these categories are converted into numerical ratings, there are difficulties in applying these ratings to compare different employees.
Therefore, an organization may wish to use a system of employee rankings to supplement its performance rating systems. Unlike a pure numerical rating, a ranking system will attempt to generate an ordered list of the employees based upon the one or more measures of the employees' performance or ratings. Ranking allows managers in an organization to rank their workforce from 1 to N, where 1 is the highest ranking employee and N is the lowest ranking employee. With ranking, it is easy to identify for example, the top 15% of an Enterprise or the lowest 5%. This then can assist in the compensation or promotion processes. Employees are usually ranked at all levels in the organization hierarchy with each manager ranking employees under them out of their total population. In such a ranking system, it is difficult to compare employee ranks obtained at various levels.
One way to implement a ranking system is where every manager provides a rank recommendation for employees that report to that manager. This recommendation is then submitted to his supervisor who repeats the step for his larger population. This process rolls up through the multiple hierarchical levels of the organization. At the end of this process, there will be a final ordering of the 1 to N ranks for the total workforce.
The problem is that typically, ranking is a very manual and time-consuming process. Within a ranking system, it may be very difficult to determine rankings for individual employees. One reason for this is because with organizations having high employee population levels, it becomes very difficult for managers to assign individual ranks to their employees. For example, a typical high-level manager may have many hundreds or thousands of employees within his/her hierarchical chain. Manually assigning ranks to hundreds or thousands of employees is a virtually impossible task for the manager, especially given that there are exponential complexities that must be considered for organizations that have many employees at many different hierarchical levels.
Moreover, the high level managers may not even have the time, knowledge, or correct level of perspective to be able to adequately rank individual employees—the high level manager may have personal knowledge of his direct reports, and perhaps even to a few more levels of reporting beneath his direct reports. However, at some point, the chain of reporting extends far enough away from the manager such that he will not have the proper level of interaction or focus to be able to individually know and compare the employees. Therefore, these managers almost entirely have to rely on the ranking by lower managers.
To address these and other problems, some embodiments of the present invention provide an improved approach for implementing employee scorings. Also described in some embodiments is an improved approach for implementing employee ratings and rankings. Other and additional objects, features, and advantages of the invention are described in the detailed description, figures, and claims.